Future wireless communications systems are operating at ever higher carrier frequencies in a quest to find greater bandwidth and less interference. These wireless communications systems may operate at frequencies of 6 GHz and above. Such wireless communications systems are link-budget limited. Therefore, communications (transmissions and receptions) may need to be beamformed, even the control channels and synchronization signals, in order to meet performance requirements in an operating environment with high path-loss.
In the Fifth Generation (5G) New Radio (NR) architecture communicating devices face challenges arising from the narrow width beams used in beamformed communications. In particular, communicating devices in an inactive or idle state (mobility), or those participating in paging, area update (AU), discrete reception (DRX) ON operation, and so on, have significant difficulty in performing device or network discovery, e.g., downlink (DL) and uplink (UL) synchronization and beam alignment, etc., in reviving quickly data communications, and in setting up a connection if one is needed at all. Device or network discovery is more difficult in beamformed 5G NR systems (as compared to omni- or quasi-omni-directional Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Long Term Evolution (LTE)) due to high paging overhead and time intensive synchronization upon user equipment (UE) wakeup (for paging, AU, or DRX ON) as beamformed links (BFLs) between UE and network entities may have become spatially misaligned during the inactive, idle, or DRX OFF period.
Therefore, there is a need for systems and methods for improving discovery, enabling quick wake-up or small data exchange, and signaling of status update and connection setup in communications systems using beamformed communications.